CARIFESTA XIV, August 16 thru 25, Trinidad & Tobago

CARIFESTA XIV is right around the corner! The fourteenth edition of the largest Caribbean cultural festival launches on the 16th of August 2019, on Trinidad & Tobago.

CARIFESTA XIV is right around the corner! The fourteenth edition of the largest Caribbean cultural festival launches on the 16th of August 2019, on Trinidad & Tobago. For ten days, up until the 25th of August, the streets of the island will be all about manifesting Caribbean culture! This year’s theme: ‘The Tangible and Intangible – Connect, Share, Invest’.

The participating CARICOM-countries are: Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago and the Turks- and Caicos Islands. In addition to these, Canada, Curacao and Venezuela have also registered. Some of the big names scheduled to perform at the Super Concerts are Jamaica’s Shaggy, Guadeloupe’s Kassav and Trinidad & Tobago’s Machel Montano.

For over four decades CARIFESTA, short for Caribbean Festival of the Arts, has been a vibrant platform for the Caribbean, for a cultural showcase of creativity and talent from the world of the visual and literary arts, storytelling, fashion, body art, crafts, theater, dance, music, film and new media of the participating countries and the diaspora.

Trinidad & Tobago is without a doubt a perfect location: the creative and cultural center of the region, the home of ‘the largest show on earth’, as carnival is also called in this region.

In 1972, the Guyanese Prime Minister Forbes Burnham, was the great inspiration behind the first edition of CARIFESTA. Suriname has fulfilled the role of host country twice, in 2003 and in 2013. In 2017 CARIFESTA XIII was held in Barbados.